LING 211 – Introduction to Linguistic Analysis Section 01: TTh 1:40–3:00 PM, Eliot 103 Section 02: TTh 3:10–4:30 PM, Eliot 103 Course Syllabus Fall 2019 Sameer ud Dowla Khan Matt Pearson pronoun: he or they he office: Eliot 101C Vollum 313 email:
[email protected] [email protected] phone: ext. 4018 (503-517-4018) ext. 7618 (503-517-7618) office hours: Wed, 11:00–1:00 Mon, 2:30–4:00 Fri, 1:00–2:00 Tue, 10:00–11:30 (or by appointment) (or by appointment) PREREQUISITES There are no prerequisites for this course, other than an interest in language. Some familiarity with tradi- tional grammar terms such as noun, verb, preposition, syllable, consonant, vowel, phrase, clause, sentence, etc., would be useful, but is by no means required. CONTENT AND FOCUS OF THE COURSE This course is an introduction to the scientific study of human language. Starting from basic questions such as “What is language?” and “What do we know when we know a language?”, we investigate the human language faculty through the hands-on analysis of naturalistic data from a variety of languages spoken around the world. We adopt a broadly cognitive viewpoint throughout, investigating language as a system of knowledge within the mind of the language user (a mental grammar), which can be studied empirically and represented using formal models. To make this task simpler, we will generally treat languages as though they were static systems. For example, we will assume that it is possible to describe a language structure synchronically (i.e., as it exists at a specific point in history), ignoring the fact that languages constantly change over time.